The Waltzing Testicles Of Thoth

Is the energy running throughout the universe – which is the universe – primarily neutral, or is there an energy one could call benign? The answer is, in some way, yes. But how does a banjo sound in grunge music? The banjo is a happy sound. Grunge is a dark sound. I can already hear disagreements, and this is a sign that the ocean is unbalanced. For instance, have you ever stood in a bathroom listening to the Brandenburg Concertos? You can do that if you’re alive, and stand on your legs, and maneuver your eyes, and most importantly have a set of ears on your head. It all adds up to one thing: an ocean of consciousness which is shared with billions of other souls. This is the essence of music. Or is it more like spars on a ship, or ruffles on a shirt? This is no time for ruffles. This is a time of T-shirts and baggy pants. “Maybe,” by The Chantels, was my end of the rainbow. So yes, the energy is benign. A woman’s voice cutting through the chill of existence. 

More and more language seems to me a kind of echolocation, not for the darkness bats inhabit, but the cognitive darkness humans inhabit. Even if the words are written down in quiet with no sound attached at all they rebound from hidden realities, or increase the insistence of things on our consciousness, radiant knots and luminous details. I don’t know what goes on neurologically, but having a medium like language between our experience of the world and our thoughts on the world can lead to some very strange distortions. They play the mind into a restless probing of what is real and what is simulacrum. Ping, ping, ping. Looking. Always looking. “As if there is a ‘god’ outside of / the inside of my skull.” And “the poem waits / for us to discover the larger mind at play.” Paul Nelson, The Day Song of Casa del Colibri. And it does have a point, however pointless it may seem, it will puncture the air and drop its candy like a burst pinata.

I've seen words mutate in meaning in very odd ways, but this one takes the cake: I looked up the French word 'valseuses,' meaning 'waltzers,' and was quite surprised to discover that it has acquired an alternate meaning, a variation in slang, which means 'balls,' as in 'testicles.' "Oh mes valseuses, elles vont craquer." "Oh my balls, they’re going to explode." "Il glace ses valseuses." "He's icing his balls." How do you go from waltz to testicles? Is it because they may be imagined to swing back and forth in a ball sack? The image of testicles waltzing to the sound of Richard Strauss is difficult to entertain. First I think of a China dragon drone show, then I think of the Secret Service finding cocaine in a cubby in the West Wing of the White House, and then I think of Ingenuity – the four pound NASA helicopter - phoning home from Mars, breaking a 63-day silence. Then I try to put these things together in a way that makes sense of life on planet Earth in the 21^st century, and what this has to do with the mutation of words, etymologically speaking. I’m looking for clues. Which – spelled ‘clew’ – once meant “a ball of thread or yarn.” The shift in meaning references the clew of thread Ariadne gave to Theseus to use as a guide out of the Labyrinth in Greek mythology. The way out of the labyrinth is gathered from seemingly random phenomena, a semiosis of the anomalous. The vas deferens in the waltzing testicles of Thoth.  

In the same way that you cannot isolate a phrase of music from the rest of the composition because of its fluidity, no one can predict precisely what a word is going to do given the linguistic orchestration in which it has been played. This is how a universe behaves. Particles pop in and out of existence. Find a position, you lose velocity. Find velocity, you lose position. It’s all about probabilistic quantum fluctuations and semantic fluidity. The universe does what it does because it’s the universe. Language does what it does because it’s a wilderness. These things are intertwined. Each sentence is a primordial universe. What’s going on in your mind? Does it feel primordial & hot, or stable and stale and stippled and flat? Most of the time, I don’t even know what's going on in my mind until I ornament it with words. You know, like a mime.